Map of destinations from London Airports

London has four very busy airports and one quieter inner city airport that means that the airspace around the South East of London is extraordinarily busy. It did make me wonder where you can actually fly from London to. 

London Heathrow is supposed to be the busiest airport in the world for international traffic (although that seems a very flexible claim) and London Gatwick is supposed to be one of the busiest single runway airports in the world. London Stansted is no slouch (busier than most city's airports) and London Luton is the size of most city's only airports too. London City is small but perfectly placed for the money men at Canary Wharf and quite a nice little airport too.

Wikipedia is great for keeping a relatively up-to-date list of airlines and destinations from most world airports but I couldn't see any map on the general internet showing all the places you can get to from all the main London airports - there's quite a few showing from one airport or another and once showing UK destinations but I couldn't see any showing all the destinations so...

...in an extremely slow news day (yes, I was very bored), I used Wikipedia, Excel, and Google Maps to create this map showing around 400 destinations. Obviously not the definitive map and some of the flights are seasonal (summer and winter)  but better than nothing. It's also a "line in the sand" type of map - probably getting obsolete by the second. I hope someone finds it handy or interesting though:

Destinations from London Airports

If you fancy seeing the actual Google Map, click here.

While not a plane-spotter myself, I am a bit of a transport nerd so I'm always curious about what's flying overhead, and where it's heading too/from and PinkFroot's Plane Finder iPhone app is superb for that.

Mac formatted PC drive not showing in Windows

In the last couple of years I've managed to screw up 2 USB drives by reformatting them using my Mac. This didn't use to be the case.

Most recently, I was using a 4GB USB stick drive to copy files from a PC laptop when the laptop went into hibernation (ran out of batteries).

When it came back to life, the drive wouldn't read on the Mac I wanted to copy the files to.

I thought I'd reformat it on the Mac OS machine I have and used Disk Utility to format it as FAT32 format which should mount on a PC. It showed 4GB on my Mac but when I put it in a PC it said it needed to be formatted and would only offer to format it as 200MB. Needless to say, I was slightly"miffed".

I had a sneaking suspicion it was to do with the GUID partitioning scheme newer Macs use for disks. Some Googling later, I came upon this post by MacTalk Australia forums user Oceanic:

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/28/75333-formatting-usb-drive-mac-windows.html#post937734

which had the answer:

I have managed to do it using Disk Utility.

• Select the drive, then go to the partition section.
• Select the format as MS-DOS (FAT) (it will make this FAT32).
• Select the number of partitions (I have always selected one) in the drop-down box.
• Click on the Options button at the bottom of the partition diagram.
• Select the Master Boot Record option.

If you now apply that, it should create the drive using MBR (master boot record) rather than GUID Partition Table (GPT). Windows is incapable of reading GPT when created on a Mac. If you don't select an option, it seems to use GPT as the default, thereby rendering the drive unreadable on a Windows machine.

This worked fine and I now have a perfectly functioning PC formatted drive (Apple don't make it easy!). I've reposted it here as I spent considerable time Googling the answer and hopefully if I type enough in it will help someone else.

I'm guessing this also would have fixed another USB drive I'd bought. It was one with 2 partitions - one for security - which I didn't want. I tried to do it as 1 and it all went wrong. This may have fixed that too.

Is homoeopathy rubbish...I don't think so

There's been a campaign recently in the UK for getting homoeopathic drugs removed from pharmacies like Boots (a major high street chemist in the UK) and to generally write off homoeopathy as...well...bullshit.

I would disagree - despite being highly sceptical of just about everything (I still am a liberal, science loving geek). I don't speak as a scientist (I'm not) or from any huge research on my part - just from my experiences of the healthcare world (traditional or otherwise).

When I was a teenager, I had major sinus problems (multiple eye-watering headaches every day) and went to doctors numerous times. They gave me lots of drugs - which, if the placebo effect (and the above campaign claims homoeopathic successes are just placebo based) was to be considered, should have "cured" me. It didn't - zero effect.

I went to a homoeopath - and despite being sceptical, what he gave me worked. He thought something (weedkiller - common on roadsides in NZ where I'm from) had been effecting my sinuses and gave me homoeopathic amounts of it for my system to accept (initially that made me think that was bad but the same applies to normal inoculations and is just as scary as taking "good bacteria" for the stomach). This made the headaches go away ...until the next time someone sprayed their weeds.

However, another type of practitioner probably regarded as a hippie - a naturopath - said that my immune system was in a poor state (something the doctors nor the homoeopath saw - no, I have never been a big drinker) and put me on a course of simple off-the-shelf vitamins and minerals (some you'd recognise from detoxing - which is also regarded as "bad science") and some basic good advice. Again sceptical - result, not one headache in over a year (until I diverged from the advice). Yes, I went back to following the simple advice very quickly!

Compared:

• doctors - result: no change, still had the headaches.
• homoeopath: got rid of the headaches as they arose but was still liable to get them.
• naturopath: got rid of headaches in a more permanent way.

That said, I would still go to doctors for other things (although now, I'm mostly healthy) and like in every "profession" (doctors, homoeopaths, naturopaths, or any other) there are good, bad, well meaning but useless, and dangerous practitioners. Like in all professions, being able to "dot the i's and cross the t's" also doesn't make you good at your job too but it would be good if there was some decently accepted certification for natural health practitioners.

As part of this campaign mentioned above there was a joke homoeopathic mass overdose yesterday.As for overdosing on homoeopathic pills - when something is watered down to 1/10000 strength, that is going to take eating a LOT of pills to "dose" let alone overdose and even then, a lot of commonly available homoeopathic pills are just "cleansers". Hardly scientific there. And when you see pharmaceutical companies looking into every second crackpot idea/old wive's tale for ideas so they can give doctors the next "scientific" cure - well, again, hardly a victory for modern science.

If a cure works, good, if it doesn't, bad - and for every dangerous crackpot there'll be plenty of failed pharmaceutical trials and many successful pharmaceutical drugs that have very dangerous side effects.

Things to do when you're rich - part 1

I'm sure everyone's had a thought or two about this - what you'd do when (or in most cases, if) you became rich [actually, maybe there should be a suggestion website for what already rich people could do with their money - or is that Harrods.com?].

Given some thought (and excessive richness), one of my more crazy ideas is this:

I'd get a room - possibly the best place would be a work reception - and have a slightly tilted floor descending away from the door. Over the floor would be a custom made shag pile carpet where the shag pile gets thicker (higher) as you walk into it.

The net effect is what looks like a normal level carpeted floor that, as the person walks into it, it gets deeper so you end up wading through it. Most disconcerting but probably very cool ;)

Just a thought!

Troubleshooting tips for iPhone apps

While I've REALLY enjoyed my new iPhone (despite its flaws), one thing you bump into a lot is problematic applications on the phone.

Even the best of programs (like NetNewsWire and Bloomberg) get crashy and it is amazingly common for apps to either freeze up, crash or (to my surprise for an OS X running machine) take down the whole phone entirely.

Often just restarting the app works fine (after a crash) or force quitting it if it has frozen (force quit by pressing and holding - for around 5 or so seconds - the menu button on the bottom of the iPhone).

Sometimes however, this doesn't work and often in the case of a new download you can erroneously (mistakenly, in error?) think that the app is, for a better word, crap. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. A particularly handy to-do app called Zenbe seemed to crash on start-up, then I discovered lots of my apps were crashing. In this case, rebooting the phone often works (and in Zenbe's case it did when other things didn't). Reboot the phone by pressing and holding the power key (the one at the top) until you're prompted to turn it off.

Sometimes, if it's an app you've had on your iPhone for a while, it's best to make sure there are no updates available - most apps are updated regularly. This can be done either on the phone through the App Store or through iTunes by clicking in Applications in the library sidebar and going Check for Updates.

And, if the other reviews on the App Store indicate people are happily using things, the last thing I normally try is to delete the app off the iPhone (press and hold on the app in the menu window until it "jiggles" and click the cross) and off iTunes (select it in the Application list and hit backspace) then download it afresh from the App Store (it will be free if you've purchased it already).

So, to sum up, try:

• restarting the app;
• force quitting the app (if it has frozen);
• rebooting your phone;
• making sure the apps are up-to-date;
  
• deleting the app from both the phone and iTunes and re-downloading.
  

Anyway, NetNewsWire went all problematic on me (which is a pain as it is perfect for the iPhone) and I ended up doing the last thing which got it all working happily again :)

Buying the iPhone 3G

Well, it took a while but I got an iPhone 3G on launch day here in the UK.

I'm not normally one of "those queuing people" but I was on late shift that day and have 2 Carphone Warehouses and 2 O2 stores (the UK partners of Apple) within 100 meters of my flat - did I have anything better to do? Probably not.

The stores opened at 08:02 (a play on the O2 network name) and I headed out just past 7am. The O2 store in Kensington's mall seemed to have the shortest queue so me and my book (Terry Pratchett's Making Money) joined at the end of a queue of about 15-20 (only one of which was a woman).

As the store was the main thoroughfare out of High Street Kensington Station and I worked nearby, I wholly expected to see people I knew walk by (and I did) and in any case I was joined by a colleague who'd decided to come to work early to queue too.

The store opened on time but o2's systems had collapsed under the load of credit checking, checking for existing customers' ability to upgrade, and a wholesale collapse of their activation abilities.

It took about 15 minutes to process 2 people (let in to the store bit by bit) so it took until just after 10 to get my new iPhone 3G 16GB - if you were much further down the queue you would have missed out - the 16GBs were in short supply and we were only lucky that a delivery of 4 more came while we were queuing.

Fortunately we had a good chat in the queue and all the people watching was superb - lots of people going by thrying their hardest not to look curious about why there was a big queue here :)

The customer service was orderly given the circumstances and the store manager did a great job of keeping the queue updated on the availability of the different models. As I neared the front of the queue, the queue went down a bit as people had to rush off to work or left because of the lack of available 16GB models. As I left, mainly women were in the queue - either not fussed with the 16GB version, or maybe just wise enough not to get up early!

Back home, I wasn't expecting the phone to be activated until at least the evening or the following day (as it turned out - after o2's systems were up and down all weekend - it didn't activate until 32 hours later) but fortunately no problems with Apple's servers at that time so I had a fully functioning wifi browsing machine - just no phone.

Supposedly the number transfer from my old network (Orange) will happen by the 16th - 5 days after I gave them the number transfer code. A long time but I have my old phone in the meantime and my iPhone with a temporary number too.

All-in-all, an alright experience - much better than in the US (where Apple's downed serves left quite a few "bricked" iPhones around) and here at Apple stores (where Apple staff weren't used to O2's systems being down).

Why Apple will remain a hardware company (abridged version)

...because it's much harder to make a copy of a iPod, iPhone or Mac than it is to copy a DVD or CD with software on it.